How Trading Fees Work and How to Pay Less: Maker, Taker, Explained
Every trade quietly skims a little off, and over time it is not a small number. Here is how spot fees are calculated, the difference between Maker and Taker, and the real ways to pay less.
When you buy a coin, not all of your money turns into coin. The exchange skims a small fee. Look at one trade and it is tiny, easy to ignore; but once you buy and sell often, the total adds up to a real number. On top of that, plenty of beginners never notice how much got taken, or that a couple of moves can halve the rate. This page lays the fee out fully: how it is calculated, why there are two rates, and how to pay less.
How the Fee Is Actually Calculated
A spot fee comes down to a simple formula:
How high is the rate? Standard spot rates across the big exchanges are much the same, with Binance's standard spot rate around 0.1% as the example (follow whatever the exchange page shows in real time; we do not write it in stone). What does 0.1% feel like? Buy 1000 and 1 comes off; buy 100 and a dime comes off. For a small-amount beginner, a single trade is barely felt; but if you buy and sell often, back and forth a few times a day, the rate becomes a real drag.
Build one instinct here first: the more often you trade, the more the fees eat. This is part of why people tell beginners not to trade often. It is not only the fear of chasing pumps and panic-selling; on the fee line alone, frequent trading is a steady bleed. You can use the fee calculator to enter an amount and a rate and see exactly what each order costs, so you have a number in mind.
What Maker and Taker Really Are
You may have noticed two numbers in the fee table: a Maker rate and a Taker rate, with Maker usually lower, sometimes even zero. The two words sound intimidating, but they just describe whether your order added liquidity to the market or took liquidity away.
- Maker (the resting side). You place a limit order, it does not fill right away, and it sits on the order book waiting for someone to fill it. You gave the market a resting order, which adds liquidity, so the exchange rewards you with a lower rate.
- Taker (the taking side). Your order drops in and fills immediately against a resting order already on the book. You took liquidity someone else provided, so the rate is the standard one.
Plainly: if your order fills right away, you are the Taker; if it rests and waits to fill, you are the Maker. This has nothing to do with whether you mean to buy or sell, only with how the order fills.
Resting vs Taking: Which One Are You
Match it against what you usually do and you will know which side you are on most of the time:
| Your action | Usually counts as | Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Market order (fills now at the current price) | Taker | Standard rate |
| Limit order priced to fill immediately | Taker | Standard rate |
| Limit order priced so it will not fill at once, left resting | Maker | Lower rate |
See the pattern? With the same limit order, whether the price can fill right away decides if you are a Maker or a Taker. Place a buy a little below the current market and it will not fill at once, it rests on the book, and you are a Maker at the better rate; place a buy above the current ask and it instantly takes a resting sell order, and you become a Taker. A market order is almost always a Taker, since its whole nature is to fill immediately.
How to actually use market and limit orders, and how to walk a first order, is in Buying Your First Coin, with the full steps. Read it next to this page and you will get a real feel for when you are saving on fees.
How to Bring the Fee Down
Once you know where the rate comes from, paying less has a handle. A few concrete ways:
One, pay with the platform coin. Binance's platform coin is BNB; turn on Pay Fees With BNB in the settings and the system takes the fee from your BNB balance and gives a discount. This is one of the most-used long-term ways to save, as long as you hold some BNB. The exact discount, and whether it still applies, follow whatever the exchange page shows in real time.
Two, enter a referral code at sign-up for the fee discount. Put a valid referral code in when you register (this site uses BNB2569) and your trades get the matching discount. It stacks on top of the standard rate, and over the long run it saves a fair bit. Note: the referral code goes in once, at sign-up, and is hard to add later, so do not skip it when you open the account.
Three, rest orders when you can instead of taking. Use Maker (resting limit orders) more and Taker (market orders or instantly-filling ones) less, for a better rate. Of course this depends on the market and your patience, and you should not miss a moment to save on fees, which the next section gets into.
Four, do not buy and sell often. The most underrated and most effective one. Fees are charged per trade and per amount, so the less you trade, the smaller the total taken. Beginners most easily pay a big tuition on frequent trading without noticing, losing on the market and on fees both.
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Should a Beginner Bend Their Trades to Save
Now that the ways to save are out, here is some cold water: as a beginner, do not warp your trading decisions to save a fraction of a percent in fees.
A common cautionary case: someone, to be a Maker and shave a little off the rate, wants to buy but insists on resting a limit order below market, the price does not come back, the order never fills, and they miss out. Gambling a few percent of price movement to save a few thousandths of a percent in fees is a bad trade.
The right priority is: get the trading decision itself right first (whether to buy, how much, what price makes sense); fees are a small thing you optimize on the side, not what drives your moves. Set up the few long-running save moves, turn on BNB discount, enter the referral code at sign-up, do not trade often, and that is enough. These are set-once or habit moves that keep paying off, with no need to agonize over Maker versus Taker on every order.
What actually saves you money is never squeezing the rate on every trade, it is making fewer pointless trades. If that thinking lands with you, follow it on to 20 Terms a Beginner Should Know to fill in the basics, then back to Crypto for Complete Beginners to string the whole path together. Keeping a steady pace is worth far more than shaving those fees.
Want to try it yourself?
Open an account, buy a little, and it sticks better than reading ten more articles. Binance is the easiest place for a beginner to start.
This article contains a Binance referral link. If you sign up and trade through our link, we may earn a commission and you get a matching fee discount. That is how this site pays for itself, and it does not change what we write. We are an independent third-party information site, not the official Binance website. Rates, discounts, and processes follow whatever the exchange page shows in real time. Crypto prices swing hard and you can lose your entire stake. This is for education only and is not financial advice.